News

We are at the end of this really successful campaign. Our thank goes to all the people that have trusted in us and in our dream. It was really amazing understanding that our vision is shared and appreciated by a lot of people. Now it’s our turn: we will work hard to deliver a product that can give back all the trust and hope we have felt.

A special thank goes to Jason Scott: his support and advice was fundamental for us.

In these weeks we have also understood the importance of memories and the value of the interview with Jack Tramiel. At the end of the commercial life of this project we will donate all the raw footage to the Internet Archive and Computer History Museum. We don’t want that, at least these memories, will be like “tears in rain”.

As usual we have our own way to say thank you and is to tickle not with one but with two short clips. The former is absolutely amazing, and the end scene from “what was happening behind the scene” with Nolan Bushnell will make you laugh… It’s the story of the game Breakout and how the most famous Silicon Valley duo moved their very first steps

The latter is just a romantic voyage in these tech stuff that we love…

Tomaso wants to share some thoughts about the history of this project that, i hope, will (again) explain what stopped us four years ago:

“Many people asked what the hell happened in 2012 that prevented us to deliver the DVD boxes we had put in preorder.

This story begins two years earlier when we started shooting around the world, mainly in the US.

As someone has already pointed out the aim of the project was huge, we wanted to tell everything from the 8bit era for an audience possibly larger than the core passionate of retro computing.

In the beginning of 2011 our company went essentially broke due to multiple different causes, the main being the massive financial crises that invested our country, killing the leisure businesses first. Too many went out of business and we were forced to shrink our activity down to basically a couple of people from the 20+ that worked with us.

It was practically impossible to develop anything nor to bring 8bit generation to conclusion.

The documentary itself was a black hole in the balance sheet: we had spent a lot of money for it and raised nothing and we didn’t have a clue of when we were going to get anything. The project itself, stuck in the middle, appeared to be one of the causes of our crisis.

We had to move it out of the stuck and we decided to put personal money in to finish shooting, which we did during 2011. At that point we had completely run out of money, businesswise and personally, but we had a hell of a library to work on.

Nonetheless we were once again stuck, unable to afford post production.

We then tried to raise money by preselling our DVD box set and finance postproduction, but, you won’t believe that, we raised too little money to do anything and the money we raised was dried up immediately by our own daily expenses. It was the worst moment at all: we were living our lives with no money, we were unable to get back on track with anything, we were unable to do what we promised. We felt so bad that we didn’t want to communicate our problems to any one, that’s why we didn’t say anything, we just wanted to disappear and be forgotten.

Shame was our main feeling. Despair was our fault and we do apologize for that.

In 2014 we received yet another mail from our biggest supporter Jason Scott and we finally decided to answer. Maybe the time was right to start all over again.

We wish to thank everyone who believed in us back then and everyone who are believing in us right now. Everyone who preordered the DVD box will receive a free download of Growing the 8bit Generation.

Time has gone, money hopefully not, our documentary work will remain for the generations to come.”

An enormous thank to Jason Scott: he has supported us since the beginning and give us the motivation to be here. Yesterday, on his blog, has written his thoughts and he was fantastic! You can read it here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4788